Interesting finds on the shores of the history of science

The Rolduc Conference: A Postmortem

The fifth edition of the History of Science PhD-conference in Rolduc showed that projects currently carried out under the banner ‘history of science’ are remarkably diverse in character. Chronologically, participants covered the period between the Carolingian Renaissance (eight century) to the present, while subjects of research ranged from the work of Christiaan Huygens to the first Dutch-made car and ASM International. Despite this enormous variety, several cross-cutting themes emerged from the conference that beg further discussion. In this recap, I will consider four of them: sources, stories, concepts, and socially engaged history of science. You are all cordially invited to continue the discussion via this blog.

Sources

During the past decades, historians of science have expanded their corpus of sources dramatically. Many still work with ‘classical’ documents like Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. Old problems abound. Medievalists, for instance, are faced with source scarcity and fragmentation. Others, however, who are looking at less traditional sources like novels, artwork, or material objects, encounter new problems. Are the established interpretative techniques (e.g. hermeneutics, textual analysis) still the right tool for the job? How to make sense of medical images, cinematography or bodily fluids?

One participant felt she was ‘drowning’ in her material. There were simply too many documents to comprehend. She asked the audience to act as a rescue team: what are the best ways to select and order data? Promising, yet not without challenges, is the current (re)appreciation of quantitative analysis in the digital humanities. Computer programmes are used to analyze and interpret big datasets like digital newspaper archives. Does this development mark the end of the traditional archive?

Stories

Closely related to these source problems is the issue of story-telling. How to turn your data into a coherent narrative that is scholarly sound as well as interesting to the reader? Participants at the conference approached this challenge from different angles. Some looked at change over time and presented their findings in chronological order. Others, however, presented a synchronic case-study by analyzing an event that occurred at a certain moment in time. What are the pros and cons of these approaches?

By focusing on an exchange of letters between Dutch and German scholars around the Great War, one participant beautifully demonstrated how sources can almost speak for themselves. In response a commentator stated that we should never neglect our own voice. After all, it is the historian who tells the story and not her historical protagonist. So, how many direct quotes does a good story need? Should we repress our own presence or frankly admit that we as historians construct the past?

Concepts

During the previous PhD Conference, the concept of ‘expertise’ haunted Rolduc. This time, a new term entered the participants’ vocabulary: ‘persona’. Despite extensive exchanges and intellectual skirmishes, the notion of expertise remains a controversial one. Is expertise something internal, a skill that scientists embody, or is an expert only an expert if others identify her as such? Various participants touched upon this issue through case-studies of economists, ecologists and ethicists. We certainly haven’t heard the last of that.

The concepts of ‘scientific self’ and ‘persona’ created confusion. What do they exactly mean? What are the main differences between the two? And what can these terms contribute to the history of science?

Socially Engaged History of Science

Past ideas about the ideal of the scientific self seem quite relevant to our present endeavors. What kind scholar do we want to be? Do we adhere to that noble ideal of objectivity and neutrality, or is the engaged scholarly persona closer to our heart? Is it possible at all to write about pig farms, medical ethics or sustainable development without taking a personal stance on the issue? Debates about a socially engaged history of science currently take place in various fora. We should all feel obliged to think about this important issue. Let’s keep the spirit of Rolduc going. You can all enter your comments and afterthoughts below.

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Featured image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Rolduc_pano3.jpg

At the conference in Rolduc some of you mentioned they wanted to read more about the ‘scholarly/scientific persona’ and the ‘scientific self’. Allow me to humbly recommend the following titles (instead of trying to write about it myself):

-Gadi Algazi, ‘At the Study: Notes on the Production of the Scholarly Self’, in: David Warren Sabean and Malina Stefanovska (eds.), Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures (Toronto 2012) 17-50.

Thanks for these titles Léon! Obviously, I haven’t had time to look at them all yet (and I can’t seem to find fulltexts of the keynotes of the KNHG conferenc on the site, though I have found some reports), but this really helps.

I like Herman Paul’s identification of scholarly personae with “embodied constellations of commitments” (his 7th thesis in the History and theory article), committed to a specific constellation of goods rather than alternative constellations that would constitute “being a [scholar]”. Do you (of-the-Scholarly-Self-project ;-)) follow him in this? Can you say something about how ‘real’ these personae are? They are presented as ideal types, and as such they seem to be our constructions; but they also model ‘selfhood’ (thesis 3), which seems to imply that they are also models with causal explanatory significance.

When we talk about models that we ourselves model our actions (and virtues/skills) by (which seems to be one aim of Paul’s article: the notion of scholarly personae, in the end, serves reflections on our own scholarly selfhood) this distinction may be less relevant than when we are studying scholarly personae in the past (which is what your project is doing, right?): the question may become relevant whether we are constructing these personae as useful fictions in order to make sense of what past historians did/thought they were doing/presented themselves as doing, or whether we are discovering these personae — i.e., identifying really existing forces that shaped scholarly selves.

At least I think that such a distinction matters, also with regard to the kinds of evidence you would need. If this makes sense: what do you think about this? (I.e. what is the explanatory status/significance of personae?)

Léjon Saarloos

Thank you Jeroen, for this question. It is quite hard to answer, but it gets me thinking. Let me try (or die trying), at least.

First of all, there are of course many ways and levels in which the concept of persona can function. Herman’s conceptualization of personae, if I have paid any attention, is formulated in such a way that they can function both in empirical, historical study, and in debates over our own conduct as scholars. I wouldn’t dare to venture into discussions about research ethics and historical theory (yet), but I hope I can say something about how ‘real’ personae are in my own research.

When you ask whether I am constructing personae as useful fictions or discovering them as true entities, I think I do the latter. Of course it also depends on the definition of persona, which I, at least for now, take simply as a collective, cultural model of scholarly selfhood, of which many can exist at the same time.

I think personae, taken as ideal-types, or preferably as cultural models for being a scholar, are very ‘real’, in the sense that they play a significant role in the shaping of scholarly selves; they have to be appropriated by individuals, but this does not mean that they do not exist in their own right, as models for living a scholarly life. To quote Daston and Sibum:

To understand personae in this sense is to reject a social ontology that treats only flesh-and-blood individuals as real, and dismisses all collective entities as mere aggregates, parasitic upon individuals. Personae are as real or more real than biological individuals, in that they create the possibilities of being in the human world, schooling the mind, body,and soul in distinctive and indelible ways. (3-4)

So I would disagree with you when you state that ideal-types are necessarily constructions of our own, or useful fictions for making sense of the sources. The concept of persona itself is of course of ‘our’ making, but these models did really exist, I think, and had to be appropriated by individuals in order to be recognized as being part of a social group.

My nineteenth-century sources (and not just the obituaries) are riddled with allusions to the exemplary virtues of person x, a life (rather than a method) that should be emulated, and on numerous occasions scholars identify their colleagues as certain ‘types’ of scholars/scientists, characterized by very specific constellations of desires and virtues (f.e. the collector, or the discover, or the applied scientist). Moreover, when engaged in boundary-work or controversy, these models of scholarly selfhood are often the target of criticism, rather than the specific merits of one’s books or methodology.

Perhaps a wonderful example of how I think personae operate and how ‘real’ they are is offered by Gadi Algazi in the article that Chao already mentioned above. Kepler, when confronted with all kinds of misery because of him being a ‘stargazer’ (a specific type that was often ridiculed), choose to identify himself with an older model of scholarly selfhood, that of the humanist of broad learning.

For my own work, the following two works have been the most influential: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Peter Galison, “Image of Self,” in Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2004); although they are obviously only the tip of the proverbial ice berg.

Chao Kang Tai

Most influential in forming my ideas about the relation between epistemic virtues and the (scientific) self that is.